Ancient Jewish History:
The Birth and Evolution of Judaism

The Hebrew religion gave us monotheism; it gave us
the concept of rule by law; it gave us the concept that the divine
works its purpose on human history through human events; it gave us
the concept of the covenant, that the one god has a special relationship
to a community of humans above all others. In the West, in the Middle
East, in most of Africa and Asia, the legacy of Hebrew religion permeates
nearly everything you see.

The Hebrew religion, so
important and far-reaching in its influence
on human culture, did not spring up overnight.
Along with the Hebrew history, the development
of Hebrew religion was a long and rocky
road. Major shifts in the Hebrew fate inspired
revolutions in the religion itself; it wasn't
until sometime after the Exilic period that the central document of Hebrew faith,
the Torah,
took its final and orthodox shape.

Through archaeology and analysis of Hebrew
scriptures, scholars have divided the development of the Hebrew religion
into four main periods.

Pre-Mosaic Stage (1950-1300 BCE)

Little or nothing can be
known for certain about the nature of Hebrew
worship before the
migration from Egypt. In Hebrew history, Abraham is
already worshipping a figure called "Elohim,"
which is the plural for "lord."
This figure is also called "El Shaddai"
("God the Mountaineer (?)," translated
as "God Almighty"), and a couple
other variants. The name of God, Yahweh,
isn't learned by the Hebrews until Moses hears the name spoken by God on Mount Sinai. This god requires animal
sacrifices and regular expiation. He intrudes
on human life with astonishing suddenness,
and often demands absurd acts from humans.
The proper human relationship to this god
is obedience, and the early history of humanity
is a history of humans oscillating between
obedience to this god and autonomy. This
god is anthropomorphic: he has human qualities.
He is frequently angered and seems to have
some sort of human body. In addition, the
god worshipped by Abraham and his descendants
is the creator god, that is, the god solely
responsible for the creation of the universe.
The god of Genesisis bisexual: he/she is often referred
to in female as well as male terms. For
instance, this god is represented frequently
as "mothering" or "giving
birth through labor pains" to the world
and humans (these passages are universally
mistranslated in English as "fathering"this
god is only referred to as a "father"
twice in Genesis ). In Genesis , Elohim or El Shaddai functions as
a primitive law-giver; after the Flood,
this god gives to Noah those primitive laws
which apply to all human beings, the so-called Noahide
Laws. Nothing of the sophistication
and comprehensive of the Mosaic laws is
evident in the early history of the human
relationship to Yahweh as outlined in Genesis .

Scholars have wracked their brains trying to figure
out what conclusions might be drawn about this human history. In general,
they believe that the portrait of Hebrew religion in Genesis is
an inaccurate one. They conclude instead that Hebrew monolatry and
monotheism began with the Yahweh cult introduced, according to Exodus,
in the migration from Egypt between 1300 and 1200 BC. The text of Genesis in their view is an attempt to legitimate the occupation
of Palestine by asserting a covenantal relationship between Yahweh
and the Hebrews that had been established far in the distant past.

All these conclusions are brilliant but tentative,
for we'll never know for sure much of anything substantial about Hebrew
history and religion during the age
of the patriarchs or the sojourn in Egypt. Nevertheless, scholars
draw on the text of Genesis to conclude the following controversial
ideas about early Hebrew religion:

 Early Hebrew religion was polytheistic;
the curious plural form of the name of God, Elohim rather than El,
leads them to believe that the original Hebrew religion involved
several gods. This plural form, however, can be explained as a "royal"
plural. Several other aspects of the account of Hebrew religion
in Genesis also imply a polytheistic faith.

 The earliest Hebrew religion was animistic,
that is, the Hebrews seemed worship forces of nature that dwelled
in natural objects.

 As a result, much of early Hebrew religion
had a number of practices that fall into the category of magic:
scapegoat sacrifice and various forms of imitative magic, all of
which are preserved in the text of Genesis .

 Early Hebrew religion eventually became anthropomorphic, that is, god or the gods took human forms;
in later Hebrew religion, Yahweh becomes a figure that transcends
the human and material worlds. Individual tribes probably worshipped
different gods; there is no evidence in Genesis that anything
like a national God existed in the time of the patriarchs.

The most profound revolution in Hebrew thought, though,
occurred in the migration from Egypt, and its great innovator was Moses. In the epic events surrounding
the flight from Egypt and the settling of the promised land, Hebrew
religion became permanently and irrevocably, the Mosaic religion.

National Monolatry and Monotheism (1300 - 1000 BCE)

According to Hebrew history narrated in Exodus, the second book of the Torah,
the Hebrews became a nation and adopted a national god on the slopes
of Mount Sinai in southern Arabia. While we know nothing whatsoever
of Hebrew life in Egypt, the flight from Egypt is described in Hebrew
history with immense and powerful detail. The migration itself creates
a new entity in history: the Israelites; Exodus is the first
place in the Torah which refers to the Hebrews as a single
national group, the "bene yisrael," or "children
of Israel."

The flight from Egypt itself stands as the single
greatest sign from Yahweh that the Israelites were the chosen people
of Yahweh; it is the event to be always remembered as demonstrating
Yahweh's purpose for the Hebrew people. It is the point in history
that the scattered tribes descended from Abraham become a single unit, a single nation. It is also the crucial point
in history that the Hebrews adopt Yahweh as their national god.

Hebrew history is absolutely silent about Hebrew
worship during the sojourn in Egypt. A single religious observance,
the observation of Passover,
originates in Egypt immediately before the migration. This observance
commemorates how Yahweh spared the Hebrews when he destroyed all
the first born sons in the land of Egypt. The Yahweh religion itself,
however, is learned when the mass of Hebrews collect at Mount Sinai
in Midian, which is located in the southern regions of the Arabian
peninsula. During this period, called the Sinai pericope,
Moses teaches the Hebrews the name of their god and brings to them
the laws that the Hebrews, as the chosen people, must observe. The
Sinai pericope is a time of legislation and of cultural formation
in the Hebrew view of history. In the main, the Hebrews learn all
the cultic practices and observances that they are to perform for
Yahweh.

Scholars are in bitter disagreement over the origin
of the the Yahweh religion and the identity of its founder, Moses. While Moses is an Egyptian name,
the religion itself comes from Midian. In the account, Moses lives for a time with a Midianite
priest, Jethro, at the foot of Mount Sinai. The Midianites seem
to have a Yahweh religion already in place; they worship the god
of Mount Sinai as a kind of powerful nature deity. So it's possible
that the Hebrews picked up the Yahweh religion from another group
of Semites and that this Yahweh religion slowly developed into the
central religion of the Hebrews. All scholars are agreed, however,
that the process was slow and painful. In the Hebrew history, all
during the migration and for two centuries afterwards, the Hebrews
follow many various religions unevenly.

The Mosaic religion was initially a monolatrous religion; while the Hebrews are enjoined to worship no deity but
Yahweh, there is no evidence that the earliest Mosaic religion denied
the existence of other gods. In fact, the account of the migration
contains numerous references by the historical characters to other
gods, and the first law of the Decalogue is, after all, that no
gods be put before Yahweh, not that no other gods exist.
While controversial among many people, most scholars have concluded
that the initial Mosaic religion for about two hundred years was
a monolatrous religion. For there is ample evidence in the Hebrew
account of the settlement of Palestine, that the Hebrews frequently
changed religions, often several times in a single lifetime.

The name of god introduced in the Mosaic religion
is a mysterious term. In Hebrew, the word is YHWH (there are no
vowels in biblical Hebrew); we have no clue how this word is pronounced.
Linguists believe that the word is related to the Semitic root of
the verb, "to be," and may mean something like, "he
causes to be." In English, the word is translated "I AM":
"I AM THAT I AM. You will say to the children of Israel, I
AM has sent you."

For a few centuries, Yahweh was largely an anthropomorphic god, that is, he had human qualities and physical characteristics.
The Yahweh of the Torah is frequently angry and often capricious;
the entire series of plagues on Egypt, for instance, seem unreasonably
cruel. In an account from the monarchical period, Yahweh strikes
someone dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant; that individual,
Uzza, was only touching the ark to keep it from falling over (I
Chronicles 13.10).

But there are some striking innovations in this
new god. First, this god, anthropomorphic or not, is conceived as
operating above and outside nature and the human world. The Mosaic
god is conceived as the ruler of the Hebrews, so the Mosaic laws
also have the status of a ruler. The laws themselves in the Torah
were probably written much later, in the eighth or seventh centuries.
It is not unreasonable, however, to conclude that the early Mosaic
religion was a law-based religion that imagined Yahweh as the author
and enforcer of these laws. In fact, the early Hebrews seemed to
have conceived of Yahweh as a kind of monarch. In addition, Yahweh
is more abstract than any previous gods; one injunction to the Hebrews
is that no images of Yahweh be made or worshipped. Finally, there
was no afterlife in the Mosaic religion. All human and religious
concerns were oriented around this world and Yahweh's purposes in
this world.

As the Hebrews struggled with this new religion,
lapsing frequently into other religions, they were slowly sliding
towards their first major religious and ethical crisis: the monarchy.
The Yahweh religion would be shaken to its roots by this crisis
and would be irrevocably changed.

The Prophetic Revolution (800 - 600 BCE)

Wearied from over two centuries of sporadic
conflict with indigenous peoples, broken by a ruinous civil war, and
constantly threatened on all sides, the disparate Hebrew settlers of
Palestine began to long for a unified state under a single monarch.
Such a state would provide the organization and the military to fend
off the war-like peoples surrounding them. Their desire, however,
would provoke the first major crisis in the Hebrew world view: the
formation of the Hebrew monarchy.

In the Hebrew account of their own history, the
children of Israel who settled Palestine between 1250 and 1050 BC,
believed Yahweh to be their king and Yahweh's laws to be their laws
(whether or not this is historically true is controversial). In
desiring to have a king, the tribes of Israel were committing a grave
act of disobedience towards Yahweh, for they were choosing a human
being and human laws of Yahweh and Yahweh's laws. In the account of
the formation of the monarchy, in the books of Samuel , the
prophet of Yahweh, Samuel, tells the Israelites that they are
committing an act of disobedience that they will dearly pay for.
Heedless of Samuel's warnings, they push ahead with the monarchy. The
very first monarch, Saul, sets the pattern for the rest; disobedient
towards Yahweh's commands, Saul falls out with both Samuel and Yahweh
and gradually slips into arbitrary despotism. This patternthe
conflict between Yahweh and the kings of Israel and Judahbecomes
the historical pattern in the Hebrew stories of the prophetic
revolution.

Whatever the causes, a group of religious leaders
during the eighth and seventh centuries BC responded to the crisis
created by the institution of the monarchy by reinventing and reorienting the Yahweh religion. In Hebrew, these
religious reformers were called "nivea," or "prophets."
The most important of these prophets were Amos, Hosea, Isaiah (who is actually three people: Isaiah and "Second Isaiah" [Deutero-Isaiah], and a third,
post-exilic Isaiah), and Micah. These four, and a number of lesser
prophets, are as important to the Hebrew religion as Moses.

The innovations of the prophets can be grouped
into three large categories:

Monotheism

Whatever the character of Mosaic religion
during the occupation and the early monarchy, the prophets
unambiguously made Yahweh the one and only one god of the
universe. Earlier, Hebrews acknowledged and even worshipped
foreign gods; the prophets, however, asserted that Yahweh ruled
the entire universe and all the peoples in it, whether or not
they recognized and worshipped Yahweh or not. The Yahweh
religion as a monotheistic religion can really be dated
no earlier than the prophetic revolution.

Righteousness

While Yahweh is subject to anger,
capriciousness, and outright injustice in the earlier Mosaic
religion, the Yahweh of the prophets can do nothing but good
and right and justice. Yahweh becomes in the prophetic
revolution a "god of righteousness"; historical
events, no matter how arbitrary or unjust they may seem,
represent the justice of Yahweh. The good and the just are
always rewarded, and the evil are always punished. If there is
any evil in the world it is through the actions of men and
women, not through the actions of Yahweh, that it is committed.

Ethics

While the Mosaic religion was overwhelmingly
concerned with the cultic rules to be followed by the
Israelites, the prophets re-centered the religion around
ethics. Ritual practices, in fact, become unimportant next to
ethical demands that Yahweh imposes on humans: the necessity of
doing right, showing mercy, punishing evil, and doing justice.

There still, however, is no afterlife of rewards
and punishments in the prophets, but a kind of House of Dust, called Sheol,
to which all souls go after their death to abide for a time before
disappearing from existence forever. There is no salvation, only the
injunctions to do justice and right in order to produce a just and
harmonious society.

The historical origins of these innovations are
important to understand. The monarchy brought with it all the evils
of a centralized state: arbitrary power, vast inequality of wealth,
poverty in the midst of plenty, heavy taxation, slavery, bribery, and
fear. The prophets were specifically addressing these corrupt and
fearsome aspects of the Jewish state. They believed, however, that
they were addressing these problems by returning to the Mosaic
religion; in reality, they created a brand new religion, a
monotheistic religion not about cultic practices, but about right and
wrong.

Post-Exilic Religion (800-600 BCE)

The most profound spiritual and cognitive crisis
in Hebrew history was the Exile.
Defeated by the Chaldeans under Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC, the Judaean population was in part
deported to Babylon, mainly the upper classes and craftsmen. In
586, incensed by Judaeans shifting their loyalty, Nebuchadnezzar
returned, lay siege to Jerusalem, and burned it down along with
the Temple. Nothing
in the Hebrew world view had prepared them for a tragedy of this
magnitude. The Hebrews had been promised the land of Palestine by
their god; in addition, the covenant between Yahweh and Abraham promised Yahweh's protection. The destruction of Jerusalem, the Temple, and the deportation of the
Judaeans, shook the Hebrew faith to its roots.

The literature of the Exile and shortly after betrays the despair
and confusion of the population uprooted from its homeland. In Lamentationsand various Psalms,
we get a profound picture of the sufferings of those left in Judaea,
who coped with starvation and massive privation, and the community
of Hebrews wandering Babylon. In Job,
a story written a century or so after the Exile, the central character
suffers endless calamities when he finally despairs of Yahweh's
justice, his only answer is that Yahweh is not to be questioned.

But Hebrew religion shifted profoundly in the years
of Exile. A small group of religious reformers
believed that the calamaties suffered by the Jews were due to the
corruption of their religion and ethics. These religious reformers
reoriented Jewish religion around the Mosaic books; in other words,
they believed that the Jews should return to their foundational
religion. While the Mosaic books had been in existence since the
seventh or eighth centuries BC, they began to take final shape under
the guidance of these reformers shortly after the Exile.
Above everything else, the Torah,
the five Mosaic books, represented all the law that Hebrews should
follow. These laws, mainly centered around cultic practices, should
remain pure and unsullied if the Jews wished to return to their
homeland and keep it.

So the central character of post-Exilic Jewish
religion is reform, an attempt to return religious and social
practice back to its original character. This reform was accelerated
by the return to Judaea itself; when Cyrus the Persian conquered
the Chaldeans in 539, he set about re-establishing
religions in their native lands. This included the Hebrew religion.
Cyrus ordered Jerusalem and the Temple to
be rebuilt, and in 538 BC, he sent the Judaeans home to Jerusalemfor the express purpose of
worshipping Yahweh . The reformers, then, occupied a central
place in Jewish thought and life all during the Persian years (539-332 BC).

Beneath the surface, though, foreign elements creeped
in to the Hebrew religion. While the reformers were busy trying
to purify the Hebrew religion, the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism,
creeped into it among the common run of people. Why this happened
is anyone's guess, but Zoroastrianism offered a world view that
both explained and mollified tragedies such as the Exile.
It seems that the Hebrews adopted some of this world view in the
face of the profound disasters they had weathered.

Zoroastrianism, which had been founded in the seventh
century BC by a Persian prophet name Zarathustra (Zoroaster is his
Greek name), was a dualistic, eschatological,
and apocalyptic religion. The universe is divided into two distinct
and independent spheres. One, which is light and good, is ruled
by a deity who is the principle of light and good; the other, dark
and evil, is ruled by a deity who is the principle of dark and evil.
The whole of human and cosmic history is an epic struggle between
these two independent deities; at the end of time, a final battle
between these two deities and all those ranged on one side or the
other, would permanently decide the outcome of this struggle. The
good deity, Ahura-Mazda, would win this final, apocalyptic battle,
and all the gods and humans on the side of good would enjoy eternal
bliss.

Absolutely none of these elements were present
in Hebrew religion before the Exile.
The world is governed solely by Yahweh; evil in the world is solely
the product of human actionsthere is no "principle of
evil" among the Hebrews before the Exile. The afterlife is simply a House of Dust called Sheol in which the soul lasts for
only a brief time. There is no talk or conception of an end of time
or history, or of a world beyond this one. After the Exile,
however, popular religion among the Judaeans and the Jews of the Diaspora include several innovations:

Dualism

After the Exile, the Hebrews invent a concept
of a more or less dualistic universe, in which all good and
right comes from Yahweh, while all evil arises from a powerful
principle of evil. Such a dualistic view of the universe helps
to explain tragedies such as the Exile.

Eschatology and Apocalypticism

Popular Jewish religion begins to form an
elaborate theology of the end of time, in which a deliverer
would defeat once and for all the forces of evil and unrighteousness.Messianism

Concurrent with the new eschatology, there
is much talk of a deliverer who is called "messiah,"
or "anointed one." In Hebrew culture, only the head
priest and the king were anointed, so this "messiah"
often combined the functions of both religious and military
leader.

Otherworldliness

Popular Judaism adopts an elaborate after-life.
Since justice does not seem to occur in this world, it is
only logical that it will occur in another world. The afterlife
becomes the place where good is rewarded and evil eternally
punished.

While the reformers resist these innovations, they
take hold among a large part of the Hebrew population. And it is
from this root  the religion of the common person  that
a radical form of Yahwism will grow: the religion of Jesus of Nazareth.